Brother Cadfael 19: The Holy Thief

added, jutting a doubtful lip, "now he's getting over his saintliness. If the biblical fates go against him, Herluin will take all the vexation and shame out on Tutilo, with usury. You know it as well as I do. These monastics, they are what they are born, only with a vengeance. If they come into the world hard and cold, they end harder and colder, if they come generous and sweet, they grow ever sweeter and more generous. All one or all the other. And just when Tutilo is beginning to wake up to where he belongs, and what he has it in him to be," she said vehemently. "Well, so it was. He lied about Longner to be out of here all the evening long. Now he owes her a debt, and goes to pay it."
    "There is more than a debt in it," said Cadfael. "That lady tamed him the first time he set eyes on her. He would have gone to her no matter what lure you could have put in the other scale. And what you are telling me is that he knew very well Aldhelm was to come here that night. How did he know? It never was made known to the brothers. Only the abbot and I knew, though he may have felt that he must tell Prior Robert."
    "He knew," she said simply, "because I told him."
    "And how did you know?"
    She looked up sharply, stung into alert attention. "Yes, it's true, few people knew. It was quite by chance. B�zet overheard Prior Robert and Brother Jerome talking about it, and he came and told me. He knew I should warn Tutilo, I think he meant me to. He knew," said Daalny, "that I liked Tutilo."
    The simplest and most temperate words are the best to express complex and intemperate feelings. She had said more than she knew.
    "And he?" said Cadfael with careful detachment.
    But she was not so simple. Women never are, and she was a woman who had experienced more of life than her years would contain. "He hardly knows what he feels," she said, "for me or for anything. The wind blows him. He sees a splendid dream, and runs headlong. He even persuades himself of the splendour. The monastic dream is fading now. I know it has splendour, but not for him. And he is not the man to go with it for the peace and the quiet bliss."
    Tell me, then," said Cadfael mildly, "what happened that night, after he asked and got leave to go to Longner."
    "I would have told it at once," she said ruefully, "but that it would not have helped him. For past all doubt he was on that path, he did find the poor soul dead, he did run to the castle, like an honest man, and tell the sheriff what he had found. What I can tell does not change that. But if you can find a grain of good wheat in it, for God's sake pick it out and show it to me, for I have overlooked it."
    Tell me," said Cadfael.
    "We made it up between us," she said, "and it was the first time ever we two met outside these walls. He went out and took the path that leads up over the ridge to the ferry. I slipped out through the double gates of the burial ground to the Horse Fair, and we crept into the loft over the stable there. The wicket in the main doors was still unlocked then, after they brought the horses back after the flood. It was more than a week before the stableyard here had dried out. And that is where we stayed together, until we heard the Compline bell. By that time, we thought, he must have been and gone again. So late, and the night dark."
    "And raining," Cadfael reminded her.
    That, too. Not a night to linger on the road. We thought he would be off home, and none too keen to make another wasted journey."
    "And what did you do all that time?" asked Cadfael.
    She smiled ruefully. "We talked. We sat together in the hay to keep warm, and talked. Of his vocation freely entered into, and my being born into slavery with no choice at all, and how the two came to be much alike in the end," she said hardly. "I was born into the trap, he walked into it in avoiding another kind of servitude, with his eyes open, but not looking where he was going. And now with his own hands and feet tied he has great notions of delivering me."
    "As you offered him his freedom tonight. Well, and then? You heard the Compline bell, and thought it safe to return. Then how came he alone on the path from the ferry?"
    "We dared not come back together. He might be seen returning, and it was needful he should come by the way he would have taken to Longner. I slipped in by the cemetery gate, as I left, and he went up through the trees to the path by which he had made his way to join me. It would not have done to come together. He has